“Soap-Powders and Detergents,” “Striptease,” and “The World of Wrestling” are three among fifty-three brief essays on contemporary spectacles and icons that Roland Barthes wrote in the mid-1950s for magazines in Paris, and which, in 1957, were collected in a small book called Mythologies. The book is marked by its august and aphoristic prose about the homey, the banal, the pretentious, and the wonderful. In addition to the three that form the basis for Morris’ dance, essays center on the topics of margarine, Garbo’s dance, toys, steak and chips, plastic, wine and milk, travel guides, and Einstein’s brain, among others.